WTF! We need your support! WTF? Yes, WTF!

If you’ve had a conversation with me any time within the last 5 months, you are probably tired of hearing about the WTF.Â But I’m not tired of talking about it! I’m excited! I love being on this project and I can’t wait until we can actually start doing things!

I know. I know. I know. WTF? Doing things? What does that even mean? Is Elyse crazier than we thought?

Yeah, kind of.

But to answer your question, WTF is WTF? (Seriously, I’ve been working on these WTF jokes for months… I have tons of them… and none of them are funny. Bear with me.) WTF is the Women Thinking Free. It’s the foundation that I spearheaded with the help of the Skepchicamp planning committee after the enormous success of Skepchicamp. The Man kind of forced our hand on this one since we legally can’t hold another Skepchicamp without becoming an official nonprofit corporation in Illinois. And we can’t afford to hold another Skepchicamp without tax exempt status. (When you try to host a free event in a city with 10.25% sales tax, you’ll understand.)

Anyway, since we’re doing this, we decided we’re going to do this all the muthafuckin way. We’re taking Skepchick to the streets! This isn’t just Skepchicamp anymore. We’re hosting a lecture series, an art expo, a secret project you’ll find out about at TAM, and tonight I just submitted 6 more events for 2010 to be approved by the board (including a world record attempt.) And it all focuses on women in science and women in skepticism. And I’m just getting started!

Right now, what I need you to do is help us out. We want to rock the skeptic world offline. So, if you have a few bucks to spare, I’ve set up an online store where you can make a donation to our little organization. Come July we’ll have more to offer there than just an opportunity to give us cash, but for now, it’s the one thing we need the most.

Any day now, we’ll be officially filing our paperwork to the IRS to become a 501c3 organization. That status, once approved, is retroactive for 27 months. So your donations now will be tax deductible!

And for a limited time, you have the option to donate specifically to this year’s Skepchicon! Which is now anÂ officialÂ WTF event! So all your donations, both at womenthinkingfree.org and through Carrie’s campaign at The Point are tax deductible! (Please donate to The Point campaign first. If the campaign goal isn’t met, no contributions are made.)

Our filing fees are out of the way and we should have our app happily on it’s way tot he IRS in the next couple of weeks depending on what final touches we still have to address.

We have some big plans for big events coming up, for example the campaign we’ll be announcing at TAM and our science in art expo. We have some small plans for some small events in the mean time. The small events will run themselves for practically free, and will help us to bring in some income, but the bigger events will probably need some extra funding up front.

The money will also be used for some small administrative things like business cards and promotional materials.

(Our President/Executive director is being a huge pain in the ass slacker and insisting she gets like half the summer off from actually planning and running events herself because she’s having a baby so we’ll only be running one or two events between now and TAM.)

Sweet! Now I know what to do with all of this money that’s falling out of my pocketses.
Seriously though, this is great Elyse.
I think @K.Savage and I can scrounge a couple of bucks to throw in the pool.
And since you mentioned art… should I start drawing now?

@Elyse: Sure thing! In my experience with putting on art events, the more time you have and the more organizing and planning you do, the fewer things will go wrong. But, like, only one or two fewer things. Other than that, it’s just as big a shit-storm as you thought it would be.
Seriously though (why do I keep saying that?)
if I can be of any help, let me know. I have experience with silent auctions, organizing exhibitions, matting, framing, blah blah blah.
I’ll give you my email on FB… not that it’s really secret.